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We asked for your input on features for the next release, and we got an impressive number of responses. A total of 76 individuals and organizations responded to our poll, which is a new record for us! It's the best view into the actual needs of our community members we've ever gotten, and we're excited to share the results with you. This spreadsheet has some charts for each of the three questions on the survey, and the raw data is tucked away in some shrunken columns to the left if you're curious.

As a summary, here are the top 10 results for each question, with the number of votes received in parentheses after each feature. Keep in mind that participants were allowed to vote for more than one feature, and there's a different number of responses for each question. There's a couple of ties in there too, so don't let the visual order of things sway you when there's the same number of votes for multiple features.

What features do you need before you could move to Islandora 8?

76 Responses

Paged Content (66)

Access Restrictions and Embargoes (44)

OAI-PMH Endpoint (36)

OCR Derivatives (33)

Web Accessibility (30)

Search and Discovery Improvements (20)

IR Support (17)

MODS Metadata Display (17)

Versioning (15)

Dockerization (13)

What features are "nice to have" but not critical?

65 Responses

Citation Generation (28)

Versioning (24)

SEO (24)

RDF Mapping UI (22)

FITS Derivaties (20)

MODS Metadata Display (20)

Oxford Common Filesystem Layout (20)

Search and Discovery Improvements (16)

Web Accessibility (14)

Dockerization (14)

What features are not necessary for your organization?

42 Responses

Integration with Alternate Fedora Implementations (25)

Fedora Multi-Tenancy (Multisites) (17)

RDF Mapping UI (11)

Oxford Common Filesystem Layout (10)

Dockerization (10)

MODS Metadata Display (7)

IR Support (6)

Citation Generation (5)

SEO (4)

OAI-PMH (2)

When interpreting the results, we're putting more emphasis on the features folks feel they must have before adopting Islandora 8. The features people responding as being "not necessary" or "nice to have" balance the picture a little bit, but we're not giving a ton of negative weight to them. We view them more of a reminder that, simply put, not everyone wants every feature.

Awesomely, many of the "must have" features already have a solution in the works at some stage of development within the community. This really adds gravity to their placement in the top ten, and speaks to our incredible developer community who are already ahead of the curve! And for the rest of the "must have" features, we've already identified our starting points using core or contributed modules from Drupal.org. It's possible to do a lot in Islandora 8 by enabling modules and exporting configuration, and we're confident we can help guide community activity towards getting these features in with the least amount of code possible. Here's the current lay of the land on all these "must have" features.

Paged Content

Paged content was the clear winner of the survey, with a whopping 66 out of 76 favorable responses. When initially developing Islandora 8, we purposefully chose to focus on "single" objects first and tackle books/newspapers/serials/compounds later. It's a major use case we're not meeting yet, and the survey results are strongly indicating that it's what we should tackle next. To that effect, I'm proposing we schedule a community sprint in early September. There's a couple of pilot projects working out the kinks of paged content (UT Austin, UNLV) whom we'd love to have involved, and hopefully we can synthesize this work and come up with a solution that will work for everybody.

Access Restrictions and Embargoes

A combination of core workflow and content_moderation modules with a handful of custom plugins can cover most of this. It won't be a zero code solution, but a couple of custom conditions and actions should do the trick.

OAI-PMH Endpoint

OCR Derivatives

UPEI has developed OCR derivatives for Islandora 8. It currently lives in their Github repo, but soon will make its way as into core islandora as a submodule.

Web Accessibility

Accessibility is something that must be kept in mind throughout all stages of development, and individual institutions must take care to ensure they do not introduce inaccessible portions of their site in their custom code. As a starting point for project that require accessibility (that's you if you work for university in the U.S. or Canada), we're looking to install our modules on top of the Web Experience Toolkit distribution.

Search and Discovery Improvements

Improvements to search and discovery can be contributed in the form of extra configuration. Tweaks to indexing and faceting can all be set up throught the UI and then exported.

MODS Support

We have a lot of tools to get data out of MODS and into Islandora 8, but to generate MODS on the fly (or every time metadata is updated) we're going to use Twig templates like UPEI is doing for citations, Kent State is doing for OAI-PMH, and Diego Pino and Marcus Barnes are doing in their IMI and MIK tools for Islandora 7.

Versioning

Eli Zoller from Arizona State University has already contributed making versions with Chullo, our Fedora client. Further work to integrate that with the rest of Islandora is underway.

Dockerization

The ICG has plans for Islandora 8! The ISLE project for Islandora 7 has an upcoming phase III, which will provide docker containers for Islandora 8. Although not every organization uses Docker, Islandora 8's microservice based architecture goes hand in hand with Docker and Kubernetes. We can't wait to see the results!

Final Thoughts

We're always striving to give the community what they want, and surveys like this give us the data we need to do so. In the spirit of openness and transparency, we're releasing the results so you can draw your own conclusions. We hope you take the the time to view these results and let us know what you think. It's always easier to make decisions when you have data in front of you, and we're really grateful for all the people who took the time to fill out the survey. As our community continues to grow, we're hoping that surveys like these can help us guide development priorities (and more) in the future.

One of the features of Islandora events is a themed t-shirt given to all attendees. Every camp has its own logo, and so does each conference. We recently held a logo design contest to award a free registration and an extra t-shirt to the Islandoracon attendee who came up with the best logo to represent our third conference. We've held this contest before, but this year saw a record number of entries, making for a very close result.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Islandora 2019 Logo Contest is Hillary Webb, from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, with this design that takes the coasts as inspiration while nodding to Islandora's doe-eyed lobster mascot:

Lobster for the east coast and the Orca for the west coast, united by kelp and water.

Islandoracon will take place on the west cost, in Vancouver, BC, from October 7th - 11th. We hope you'll join us and proudly wear Hillary's design!

The team is full, the audits are complete, it's time to meet up to talk about the next steps for the Islandora 7.x-1.13 release. If you are on the team, or just interested in learning more, you are invited to tomorrow's meeting at 10:00 AM Eastern. Agenda here, with link to the Zoom meeting.

Islandora Camp went to Switzerland for the first time this summer, with a three-day camp hosted by Lib4RI - Library for the Research Institutes within the ETH domain: Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL, and located at Eawag. You can see the full schedule (and as many set of presentation slides as we could gather) here, but the highlights came on the third day, with:

an overview of the services our host provides to their internal users, including workflows and tools that make adding new material as quick and simple as possible for researchers,

a look at the migration taken by the Max Plank Insitutuute for Pschyolinguistics to move their data into Islandora, including a solution pack with a viewer for 3D images like this,

The location itself was also a highlight, as we toured the peaceful, naturally landscaped campus of Eawag and hopped stepping-stones across the reclaimed river that runs through it:

Sessions were held in a low-energy building that deploys a myriad of clever tricks to provide a comfortable, modern, multi-storey office space while using no more electricity than a couple of single-family homes. It's also quite something to look at:

This Islandora Camp was the very first held since the release of Islandora 8, and our campers we eager to explore the new stack, with a half-day dedicated to site building Islandora 8 in the Admin Track, and the entire Developer Track spent (by audience request) on the new release.

If you want to experience your own immersion in all things Islandora, you can join us in October for our every-other-year full-week conference, Islandoracon, taking place from the 7th to the 11th in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

In recognition of his many contributions to Islandora and the Islandora community, the Islandora 7.x Committers have asked Marcus Barnes from the University of Toronto Scarborough to join their ranks and we are very pleased to announce that he has accepted.

Marcus is a longstanding member of the Islandora community, a dedicated member of multiple release teams, an active participant in our Committers Calls and reviewer of open pull requests, and a great help to new community members. Marcus also actively maintains one of the most popular contributed Solution Packs, for managing Oral Histories in Islandora.

Further details of the rights and responsibilities of being a Islandora committer can be found here:

Islandoracon has always had a 'hackfest' component, but we've yet to do the same thing twice. We're trying a new format this year to give all of our attendees a chance to work together, learn new things, and produce a tangible benefit for the rest of the Islandora community: The Islandora 8 Use-a-Thon.

How it works:

Islandora 8 is more tightly integrated with Drupal than Islandora 7, and very flexible, so many use cases can be solved with a combination of configuration and Drupal contrib modules. The Use-a-Thon will crowdsource use cases for things people might want to do with Islandora (i.e, a collection that can be viewed on a map; a collection with a commercial store component; a workflow for accepting and reviewing public annotations on objects). On Monday, October 7th, after we finish up the half-day workshops, we'll have a mixer at the Vancouver Public Library where attendees can form teams and talk about what use cases they would like to explore, either picking from the crowdsourced use-cases or inventing their own.

On their own, over the week of the conference, teams will take a use case and work to demonstrate how it can be done in Islandora 8 (with configuration and Drupal contrib modules), including documentation (“recipes,” for our shared Islandora Cookbook). Points will also be given for identifying gaps that may need further development work and creating issues to document those gaps.

On Friday, October 11th, we will gather again at the Vancouver Public Library where teams will have the morning to finish up their work and prepare a brief presentation describing what they have done. After lunch we'll watch presentations, pick winners and award prizes, and officially end Islandoracon. The rest of the day will be given over to an informal discussion of the future of Islandora (8, 9, and beyond) for anyone who wants to participate.

Rules:

Entries should come from teams of at least two people.

The entries should be presented in person by at least one team member.

Only one entry per team.

No person may be in more than one team.

Screenshots should be rough-and-ready.

Writing code is discouraged; we want ideas, documentation, and GitHub issues describing what needs to be built if your use case can't be done with what's available now.

Participants must ensure that entries do not in any way infringe copyright or other intellectual property rights of any third party.

Points:

Use-a-Thon projects will be judged based on:

The value of the contribution to the Islandora community (i.e, is this something others will use?)

The difficulty of the use case

Community use case versus coming up with your own (bonus for taking on something from the community)

The complete five-day schedule for Islandoracon (October 7 - 11 2019) is now available! Please join us and our 43 speakers and workshops leaders for a week of the best in Islandora and an opportunity to get together and share.

Registration is open and the Early Bird discount is on until July 1st.

The Islandora Foundation is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Islandora 8 version 1.0.0! This is an important milestone for the Islandora project, and is a testament to our wonderful and vibrant community. Built using Drupal 8 and Fedora 5, Islandora 8 faithfully integrates the two as invisibly as possible, giving an experience that is both more Drupal-y and more Fedora-y at the same time. Islandora 8 unlocks all of Drupal's features along with its entire ecosystem of contributed modules, all the while quietly preserving your metadata in a Fedora 5 repository behind the scenes. It truly is the best of both worlds.

If you would like to try Islandora 8 for yourself, we have three options for you:

The Islandora Foundation is committed to providing utilities for Islandora 7 repositories to make migration as painless as possible. All existing Islandora 7 users are encouraged to evaluate ourmigration tools and provide us with feedback. We are dedicated to working with everybody to make sure we all move forward together!

Here's a list of all the features currently available with the 1.0.0 release (including those that come for free from contributed modules):

Model content using core Drupal entities and fields

Out of the box support for

Collections

Images

Audio

Video

PDF

Binaries

Control how content is displayed using the UI

Configure forms for content using the UI

Categorize content using taxonomy terms

Expandable file storage

Drupal's public file system

Multiple private file systems usingflysystem (check this link for a full list of supported adapters)

If there are any features that are missing that you consider to be requirements for adoption, we will be polling the community to find out what features to build next. Your input is valued and you are encouraged to participate in the upcoming poll.

This software is made possible by volunteer contributions from community members and organizations. Development, documentation, and testing are all significant undertakings that require time and effort. We thank each and every one of the people who have helped us deliver this software, to whom we owe a debt of infinite gratitude.

Aaron Coburn

Adam Soroka

Alan Stanley

Alex Kent

Alexander O’Neill

Amanda Lehman

Andrija Sagic

Ann McShane

Benjamin Rosner

Bethany Seeger

Brad Spry

Brian Woolstrum

Bryan Brown

Caleb Derven

Cara Key

Carolyn Moritz

Cillian Joy

Courtney Matthews

Cricket Deane

David Thorne

Diego Pino

Don Richards

Eli Zoller

Favenzio Calvo

Frederik Leonhardt

Gavin Morris

Janice Banser

Jared Whiklo

Jason Peak

John Yobb

Jonathan Green

Jonathan Hunt

Jonathan Roby

Kim Pham

Marcus Barnes

Mark Jordan

Meghan Goodchild

Mike Bolam

Minnie Rangel

Natkeeran Kanthan

Nick Ruest

Noah Smith

Pat Dunlavey

Paul Clifford

Paul Pound

Pete Clarke

Rachel Leach

Rachel Tillay

Rosie Le Faive

Seth Shaw

Suthira Owlarn

Yamil Suarez

We would also like to acknowledge the initial financial support from the following institutions, which got development started back in 2015:

One of the features of Islandora events is the t-shirt given to all attendees. Every camp has its own logo, and so does each conference. We want to give a free registration and an extra t-shirt to the Islandoracon attendee who comes up with the best logo to represent our second conference.

Here are the first two:

Entries will be accepted through July 1st, 2019. Entries will be judged by the Planning Committee and a winner will be selected and announced in early July.

Here are the details to enter:

The Rules:

Conference Registration is not necessary to enter; anyone with an interest in Islandora is welcome to send in a design - however, the prize is a free registration, so you'll have to be able to come to the event to claim it.

Line art and text are acceptable; photographs are not.

You are designing for the front of the shirt for an area up to 12 x 12 inches. Your design must be a single image.

Your design may be up to four colours. The t-shirt colour will be determined in part by the winning design.

By entering the contest you agree that your submission is your own work. The design must be original, unpublished, and must not include any third-party logos (other than the Islandora logo, which you are free to use in your design) or copyrighted material.

The Prizes:

One free registration to Islandoracon (or a refund if you are already registered)

An extra t-shirt with your awesome logo

Bragging rights

How to Enter:

Please submit the following by email to community@islandora.ca:

Your full name

A brief explanation of your logo idea

Your logo entry as an attachment. Minimum 1000 x 1000 pixels. Images in .eps or .ai format are preferred. We will accept .png and .jpg for the contest, but the winner must be able to supply a high resolution VECTOR art version of their entry if it is selected as the winner. Don't have a vector program? Try Inkscape - it's free!

Details:

Multiple entries allowed.

Submissions will be screened by the Islandora Planning Committee.

By submitting your design, you grant permission for your design to be used by the Islandora project, including but not limited to website promotions, printed materials and (of course) t-shirt printing.

We reserve the right to alter your image as necessary for printing requirements and/or incorporate the name and date of the conference into the final t-shirt design. You are free to include these yourself as part of your logo.

The Islandora Planning Committee reserves the right to make the final decision.

Islandora 8 will be released at the end of the month, on May 31st. Islandora's Tech Lead Danny Lamb is working with our amazing team of volunteers to fit every last feature they can complete and test before the deadline drops. If you're new to Islandora 8, have been waiting for a full release before you try it out, or are just plain curious about this new version of Islandora, we invite you to join us for a webinar on June 6th. Danny will provide an overview of the first release of Islandora 8, demos of some key features, and we'll end with a question period so you can ask about anything else you need to know.

Attendance is free, but registration is required. Please sign up here.